


Retrograde, Most Quietly

by StarsInMyDamnEyes



Series: Slightly to the Left of the Shadows [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Assassin Jaskier | Dandelion, Attempts at humour, BAMF Jaskier | Dandelion, Competent Jaskier | Dandelion, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Feral Jaskier | Dandelion, Gen, Improper Use of Dogs, Jaskier | Dandelion Has a Past, Minor Character Death, Shenanigans, The Dagger in Jaskier’s Boot, accidental acts of grievous bodily harm, also it’s not outright stated bc i forgot but please assume jaskier is part elven, far too much time spent tying up loose ends, i didn’t want to get too detailed bc this was supposed to be funny but, if murder and corpse disposal count as shenanigans, jaskier accidentally kills a man that’s it, look the day i write jaskier as a human is the day that i fucking die ok, me & my friends know too much abt covering up murders, overcomplicated corpse disposal, restraint is not my middle name, the bard stabbed a guy it’s all chill, vaguely graphic descriptions of gore, well it started as crack now it’s, which they do in my book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23584540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarsInMyDamnEyes/pseuds/StarsInMyDamnEyes
Summary: Despite the almost religious conviction with which Geralt clung to the notion that Jaskier the Bard was about as useful in a fight as a freshly-baked loaf of bread, the accuracy of such a conception left a lot to be desired. Now, Jaskier did not claim to be perfectly well-adjusted to camping alone in a forest, but his ill-suitedness did not stem from incompetence, or any similar caveat.No, Jaskier - and, by extension, the fresh corpse at his feet - had the opposite problem.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Slightly to the Left of the Shadows [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1787191
Comments: 68
Kudos: 624





	Retrograde, Most Quietly

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be a crack-fic about Jaskier accidentally-ing a murder and then I got bogged down in the specifics of corpse disposal so now it’s just kinda weird whoops

Despite the almost religious conviction with which Geralt clung to the notion that Jaskier the Bard was about as useful in a fight as a freshly-baked loaf of bread, the accuracy of such a conception left a lot to be desired. Now, Jaskier did not claim to be perfectly well-adjusted to camping alone in a forest, but his ill-suitedness did not stem from incompetence, or any similar caveat.

No, Jaskier had the opposite problem.

He was, for lack of a kinder word, jumpy. Easily surprised. Skittish. Paranoid. In his defence, though, these very traits had ensured his survival back during his training - a sleeping classmate was an easy classmate to slit the throat of, after all - and Jaskier was able to wake at the slightest of touches, shrugging off sleep for alertness in a matter of seconds, swinging a dagger at his assailant.

This had been good back when he’d been in the midst of a constant, cutthroat tournament, where children slit each others’ throats in the dead of night, because one more peer dead meant one less pair of daggers to watch for at every hour, one less possible enemy to come kill you when you least expected it.

It had been a good habit to have in training.

It was slightly a less good habit to have currently, in this very situation.

Jaskier’s victim was most likely a hapless traveller, or a villager from the nearby village, who’d stumbled upon a bard sleeping in the foliage, with no ill intent. He wasn’t even _armed_ , for crying out loud! Say what you would about the ruthless training his mentors had been so adamant made good assassins, it did not in the slightest make for well-adjusted, normal people.

His dagger had been in his _boot_. He’d pulled his dagger from his _boot_ without really knowing what he was doing and slashed a man’s throat with it. For fuck’s _sake_.

Well, it was no use dwelling on the past. What was done was done, and now Jaskier found himself having rid the world of whoever the unfortunate man at his feet was, at the cost of plus one highly inconvenient corpse to dispose of.

_Shit._

Judging from the man’s build, his clothes, and his belongings, he was of some kind of higher station in life than most. That was not comforting in the slightest. It meant that there was a greater chance that the man would be missed.

There was a greater chance that the man that Jaskier had _murdered in his sleep_ would be missed. His day had already gone to the dogs, he’d already fucked it up, and he hadn’t even been awake when he did it! Truly a new record.

His one saving grace was that he and Geralt had once again parted ways for the winter, the witcher retreating back into his keep in the mountains without even a goodbye, so he was, at least, not present for Jaskier’s impromptu act of manslaughter.

Still, now he was here, not really deep enough in the woods to be entirely comfortable frolicking around with a body, with the sun peeking over the horizon.

Jaskier was an assassin - or a former assassin, really, ever since he’d decided to give up killing for coin and started singing for it, the profession of a bard was really so much more alluring than slitting throats for his former merry band of psychopaths... but either way, he’d been taught from a young age to kill, and he was very good at it. Jaskier was _trained as an assassin_ , there we go, and as such, he’d been very well-versed in how to cover his tracks. How to make a stabbing look like a suicide, which poisons were best for which situations, if he meant to make it look like the victim had simply passed in their sleep, or if the person who hired them wanted the victim’s suffering prolonged, how to frame a servant for a heat-of-the-moment crime of passion that was really a planned attack...

Not that any of that was particularly useful in this situation, because there was a man who’d had his throat slashed in the woods, and even Jaskier’s rather extensive imagination was struggling to find a way to explain this that didn’t shout _bloody murder_.

Of course, he could have taken his knife out and made it look like a mauling... if spring wasn’t dawning and he wasn’t in the northernmost settlement between Ard Carraigh and the damn mountains the witchers liked to hole up in and consequently in the very first place that not only Geralt but all of his witcher friends, too, were likely to head, if they weren’t on their way already.

Jaskier, unlike Geralt thought, wasn’t ill-suited to camping in the forest because he was _bad_ at protecting himself. He was ill-suited because he was apparently still prone to committing acts of extreme violence in his _fucking sleep_.

The man that Jaskier had killed had, at least, died relatively quickly - a quick slash to his throat and the deed was done. Sure, it wasn’t the most pleasant way to go, your own blood bubbling up your gullet as your severed vocal chords tried desperately to scream - but there _were_ worse ways. Like extreme torture, until you’d been pushed so far past your breaking point that your body had no choice but to finally give out.

It was not a particularly comforting thought in the situation, that, despite everything, Jaskier had at least not managed to graduate to the stage of weird assassin man wherein he tortured people to death in his sleep - besides being something of a bare minimum standard to set, in the first place - but it was a digression anyways.

Right now, he had a body to dispose of, and he’d rather do it before any witnesses stumbled upon him, otherwise he’d have to commit murder on _purpose_ , to save his reputation, and he would rather not do that. One corpse was hassle enough.

Also, it would be quite rude of him. There was that, too. Besides, he much preferred bedding strangers to burying them. It was so much more satisfying.

Another digression! Apparently, while his skills and reflexes had stayed as sharp as ever, his focus had eroded to quite an extent.

Right. A body. A body whose neck he’d pulled his dagger through, carving through flesh with practiced ease, quite unknowingly on his part, in a fountain of red, as he slept.

Fuck, there was blood on his clothes, too, wasn’t there? He’d have to get rid of them post-haste, the last thing he wanted was for Geralt to catch the bloodied scent of death on him.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t spin a convincing enough tale for the witcher to explain away the situation, it was that he didn’t _want to_. He didn’t want to lie to his first real friend’s face like some kind of deceitful bastard. Even if he was, at his core, a deceitful bastard.

It was too bad, he thought to himself, as he hauled the corpse over his shoulder with practiced ease. He really liked this doublet.

The body was a bit of trouble. He couldn’t exactly bury it - even Jaskier, with his practiced strength, couldn’t hope to dig a sufficiently deep grave with his bare hands in a few hours - so what to do?

Sitting the body against a rock, Jaskier surveyed his meagre campsite and scene of his most recent crime. The first thing to do would be to hide that bloodstain, where the man had bled onto the ground.

He groaned.

Picking up every little bloodstained leaf and making an incriminating little pile of them was not a very fun activity, but it was worth it. Lighting a fire over the largest stain, where the man had fallen, Jaskier quietly thanked his decision to not do so the previous night. Covering up the remains of a second fire, too, would have been a tad more hassle than he was currently prepared to deal with. Despite the bloodied ground, the kindling caught flame and burned merrily, at which point Jaskier began to feed the assorted bloodied leaves in his pile to the flame.

This did not take him too long, as happily as the fire was roaring, and he quickly turned his attention to the corpse.

Burying the man was out, falsifying a mauling was out, and he didn’t particularly want to dice the man and scatter the pieces, either, if only for the sake of his sanity. It was such a mind-numbingly dreary task, after all, and very messy to boot.

Cremation was out - there was no way that Jaskier was ever going to manage that with the given resources, and he would also rather not start a forest fire if he could help it.

What an unpleasant ordeal this morning was turning out to be. And to think, all of this could have been so easily avoided if Jaskier hadn’t been so predisposed to _killing people in his sleep_.

Fuck.

In the end, with the bard realising that he’d rather not trek to the banks of the Gwenllech just to dispose of one, measly corpse, he remembered the town he’d passed through recently, the town near enough to his camp to reach by nightfall.

The town where one of the residents owned a pack of hunting dogs that Jaskier had noticed a while earlier.

But first, the scent.

Tracking hounds, and, more recently, other beings with enhanced senses of smell, had been something that Jaskier had dealt with before. His collection of perfumes were not, after all, just for vanity - no, the sheer number of bottles he had on his person were a little too extensive for that. Some of his perfumes were mild, like the chamomile he wore day-to-day - it was a soothing smell, one liked both by him and, although he’d never admit it, Geralt, too.

Others, like the peppermint he was now liberally spreading everywhere, in great amounts, from the floor of the campsite itself to himself to the corpse, were strong enough to overpower most anything else. It wouldn’t hide the stench of blood and death indefinitely, Jaskier knew, not once it had really seeped in somewhere - he would still have to get rid of his poor doublet - but it would cover up the scent that permeated the campsite long enough for everything lingering in the campsite - the stench of death, the tang of blood, and the slightly softer perfume that denoted Jaskier’s own presence - to dissipate naturally.

Peppermint, Jaskier carried around in large doses, for situations like this. He’d long ago begun to mentally equate the sharp scent with cleaning up corpses, far before he’d even met Geralt.

He’d never expected to end up spreading it across a campsite after he’d accidentally murdered someone. He’d thank his paranoid tendencies if only they weren’t responsible for this situation in the first place.

Then, Jaskier hoisted the corpse onto his back once more, slung both his pack and his lute in its case around his shoulder, and began trekking back towards the town, keeping a sharp ear out for the tell-tale noise of company. It was something of a nice surprise that he didn’t see neither hide nor hair of any other person as he walked - manoeuvring himself into a hiding place with a corpse as well as his supplies would not have been a pleasant experience, convinced as Jaskier was that he could absolutely pull it off.

He kept a good pace, and reached the little town by nightfall, creeping around to where the dogs were kept and pulling out his dagger.

Okay, it looked like he was going to be doing a _little dismemberment_ , but it was either that or risk the dogs leaving remains.

Sticking to the shadows, cast by the trees of the forest that the town bordered, Jaskier got to work.

Stripping the clothes and belongings from the body - he’d have to either burn those or bury them later - Jaskier set to work with his dagger. Smaller appendages, such as fingers and toes, were thrown whole to the hounds, awake and eager to feast, whilst larger bones he flayed the flesh from, holding the scraps out gently to the dogs for them to take.

There were seven dogs in all, massive hounds that had no trouble wolfing down the scraps Jaskier tossed them, and he felt a little bad for the indigestion all the bones they were swallowing would cause them. Still, they were most effective, and the bard quickly fell into the rhythm of slicing and tossing. The body had been dead for twelve hours, so the congealing blood did not flow as rapidly as it had earlier, but Jaskier’s lap was beginning to feel uncomfortably slimy. He was going to have to muddy himself like hell if he wanted to walk into the inn for a bath, at this rate.

Dagger cutting through flesh and muscle with precise efficiency, Jaskier’s feeding of the dogs was settling into a comfortable rhythm, and, by the time he’d reached the stomach, other than the larger bones, femurs and pelvis amongst them, there was little left of the unfortunate man’s legs. Ever ravenous, the hounds wolfed down every morsel they were tossed with vigour. Jaskier’s blade pierced the dead man’s abdomen, and he began to dice the internal organs up into bite-sized little chunks.

Gruelling as it was, his work paid off. By the time the moon reached its zenith, other than the head, and the piles of bloodied clothing and bones, the body was almost completely disposed of.

Now, for the face.

It felt a little odd, cutting away at the cheeks of a human being, but Jaskier had done worse. Mentally apologising to the man, Jaskier sliced away at his once-red cheeks, pale in death, cutting through skin marked by laugh lines to make a meal for a pack of hunting hounds.

After a bit of deliberation, Jaskier cut the man’s scalp away and placed it on the pile of remains he’d not given to the dogs. The last thing he needed was a pack of hounds shitting up human hair.

Plucking the eyeballs gracelessly from the skull, Jaskier tossed them to the dogs before gathering up the now significantly smaller pile of remains and retreated into the forest.

This was brilliant. A whole fucking day gone because he had killed a man in his sleep.

Once he’d retreated suitably far into the forest, he threw down the remains and his belongings on the ground, rubbed his bloodied hands dry in the dirt, and set to work lighting a fire by which to warm himself and burn the fabrics of the dead man’s clothes. As it crackled, he set to work on burying the now far smaller collection of bone, utilising the pelvis as an impromptu shovel.

In other words, Jaskier, instead of sleeping, spent his night doing something highly fucked up and distasteful because he, a trained assassin with _decades_ of experience, had _accidentally killed someone in his sleep_.

The earthy ground was soft and gave way easily, luckily for Jaskier, and the bones, jewellery, and miscellaneous non-flammable items he’d pulled unceremoniously from the corpse were soon buried in a suitably deep hole, and the fabrics and papers were burnt, with the man’s plentiful coin - definitely someone of high standing - added to Jaskier’s own.

Now, for the scent.

Not peppermint again - that would be admitting to murder, if Geralt or some other witcher caught it here - but another one of his collection. This one was one he’d been given as a gift, by a sorceress, if his memory served - and it wasn’t a perfume or scent, but a potion. Its functionality, however, was written in a neat hand that wasn’t Jaskier’s on the label, in a language Jaskier vaguely remembered picking up. It was a kind of odour nullifier - simply put, it would remove any scent from the area by masking it completely until it dissipated. For this reason, it was very useful and valuable, he’d taken care to use it exceedingly sparingly and carefully, only in the most desperate situations.

This time, however, Jaskier had decided to go _fuck it_ and splash it around by the dogs - after all, it wasn’t like he planned on covering up any future murders. They were, after all, hunting dogs - the chances of someone using them to track him for this particular crime were astronomically small, but Jaskier was a paranoid man.

That was that, then. Time to go roll in some dirt.

By the time the sun had risen, and Jaskier was finally satisfied with both his perfuming of his crimes and his muddiness, he was in the shoddy little inn he’d stayed in two nights ago, having procured a bath and a room to rest in after washing.

His doublet and the rest of his outfit burned merrily in the fireplace, as Jaskier relaxed in the warm bath - and so what if he’d poured liberal amounts of peppermint, lavender, and various other scents into the water? He was a professional, he knew what he was doing - taking his time to clean himself, savouring the moment. There was nothing quite like a warm bath after a day spent disposing of a corpse.

Eventually, though, the water turned cold, and Jaskier freed himself of it, using the water to clean his dagger, too, opting to take a small nap before venturing downstairs for a meal.

Things had been going well thus far, if one excluded the whole _manslaughter_ situation in the first place, so he really should have expected that Geralt of fucking Rivia would be sitting at a table, nursing an ale, when he stepped into the room.

Talk about impeccable timing.

“Geralt!” Jaskier grinned, waving at the witcher, who would, if asked, vehemently deny perking up at the sight of the bard. “Fancy seeing you here!”

“Jaskier,” he grunted, as the bard slid into the seat opposite him.

“I take it you’ve departed your secret mountain lair all rested and ready for adventure?”

Geralt grunted, taking a sip of his ale.

“It’s nice to see you looking so refreshed and rejuvenated,” and what Jaskier would give to also feel refreshed and rejuvenated! He’d spent the past twenty-four hours doing meticulous work, and he was feeling the exact opposite of refreshed and rejuvenated. He felt exhausted. He felt drained. He felt exactly how you’d expect a man who’d spent the past day disposing of the corpse of a man he’d sleep-murdered would feel. “What have you been up to, then, my good friend? Any news?”

Geralt grunted. “A lord went missing, three days ago.”

This was not the kind of news that Jaskier was asking after, having been much more interested in Geralt’s personal affairs, and he very pointedly did not start to internally panic. “Oh?”

“Bandits attacked his carriage some ways to the west. Said they were headed from Ard Carraigh to Malliore in Kovir. The lord got separated in the fight.”

Jaskier was most certainly not thinking of the corpse he’d spent the night feeding to dogs. He wasn’t. He had not been responsible for the demise of a hapless lord.

Well, alright, at this point it was undeniable that he most certainly had, but it wouldn’t do to let it show on his face. “So, what, there’s a lost lord stumbling around in the forest somewhere? Sounds like ballad material, a poor noble having to fend for himself in the wild.”

There _had been_ a lost lord stumbling around in the forest somewhere. Up until approximately yesterday morning, when Jaskier had - and he was still somewhat hung up on this - _murdered him in his sleep_.

Geralt grunted, and took another gulp of ale.

“Imagine being part of that entourage, though,” Jaskier continued, keeping up the flow of chatter as per usual. “Going back home and being all like, hello, folks! We lost the lord!”

“Hm,” the witcher said, the barest hint of a smirk on his face. “It did seem go to the dogs, in the end.”

**Author's Note:**

> Anyways I hope you enjoyed my 1am Witcher ramblings
> 
> I’m @stars-in-my-damn-eyes on tumblr if you wanna yell at me about the Witcher
> 
> Or give me fic prompts
> 
> Or pester me to work on Death to the Details (like I SHOULD be doing) instead of writing these fucking weird oneshots :D


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